 We're in the seventh webinar and it will be all about map design, the last chapter of the book. And as usual, I'll just introduce myself and then Kurt will introduce himself. So I'm Hans van der Kvast, senior lecturer at IHDELT Institute for Water Education. My background by education is that I'm a physical geographer, specialized in GIS and remote sensing. I did my master's and my PhD at Utef University in the Netherlands. And I worked for the Flemish Institute for Technological Research, VITO in Flanders, working on a lot of GIS stuff and modeling, spatial dynamic modeling for the environmental modeling unit, water quality, land use change. Since April 2012, I work at IHDELT Institute for Water Education as a lecturer in ecological modeling, but most of the times I do other GIS and remote sensing related stuff. I'm a board member of the Dutch QGIS user group and my main interests are open source GIS, obviously, and modeling. I'm a QGIS certified instructor and today we had 15 people getting the certificates. They were joining an online course that we have together with new langio information. Most interesting remote sensing for hydrology. We do a lot of things with water accounting and water productivity using satellite images. And in my projects, I work a lot on open data and spatial data infrastructures. You've heard the whole session on that before. And as I always say, field work is important for us too to have the link between the GIS and the stuff that we collect in the field and to understand both sides of the story. And it's nice to see that a lot of GIS people also a lot outside instead of only inside the computer. So if you wanna be in touch with me, you can send me an email, connect through LinkedIn or on social media. I'll give the word to Kurt. Hi, everyone. It's good to see a lot of familiar faces in the chat room there. I'm Kurt Menke. I am based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA and I run my own consulting business named Birds Eye View. And I'm also part of a fairly new venture called the Q Cooperative, which is myself and several core QGIS developers and documenters and trainers trying to offer QGIS support services, mainly in the United States, but elsewhere as well. And I've been also working on a program for the last several years called Community Health Maps through the US National Library of Medicine. And I do a whole mix of things. I do a little spatial analysis, a little cartography, a little teaching. And I've written several books on QGIS. The one that we're focused on here today, QGIS for Hydrological Applications with Hans and Discover QGIS 3x, which is a large workbook, 400 pages that has 32 lab exercises and allows you to kind of go through self-paced and learn a pretty thorough treatment of the features in QGIS. And I'm also a member of the QGIS US user group. And if you need to contact me, you can find me by the email address, Kurt at birdsiviewgis.com, or I also have a Q Cooperative email address. And I'm on LinkedIn and also Twitter at Geomenchi. Thanks Kurt. So this is the last one out of a series of seven free webinars that we together organized during the Corona crisis. We hoped it would already been over, but it's not everywhere over. We know that some of you like us also locked down. And I think it's a good occasion to learn new stuff, to learn great stuff that you can do with QGIS. So we started with the first webinar about preparing data from hard copy maps about geo-referencing. And you noted all the recordings are online. So you can still watch them back if you missed one. The second session we worked on importing spreadsheets and do spatial interpolation in QGIS. And then the third session was about spatial analysis with map algebra where we handled roster data and did a lot of Boolean logic. And the fourth session, very important one for hydrologists is to delineate streams and catchments from a digital elevation model. And then, yeah, once you have your catchment, you want to also add some other data to it. So the fifth session was about adding open data from open street map and from web map services. And then you want to do your analysis. So we last time went into a lot of vector analysis, vector geo-processing for calculating the percentage of land cover per subcatchments. And then we are today to create the final product in the end to visualize and to present the end results to users and to do a map design. Of course, there can be other end products that you want to have your data and models. That's also, of course, possible, but at some point you need to present your data. So today we'll be all about map design and Kurt is going to explain how that works. Yeah, so we're gonna work on this final map that's on the cover of the book, but this is the full map with all the map elements that you usually have. And it looks like a fairly straightforward map, but as you'll see, there's a few tricks that were used to make this map. You can see that there's an inverted polygon shape burst fill that I'll show you how to do off the start here, which can be a really nice way to give visual focus to the study area, in this case, the roar water catchment. Also, we've become familiar with this area working with it, but when you're making a map for your map reading audience, you need to give them a little more context to let them know what is around the area. So we're gonna add some cities and towns through the quick OSM plugin for some context. And this is, again, a map that has kind of a busy background. So it's possible to add label halos to labels. And critically, you don't want the halo to get the visual weight on the map. You don't wanna see the halo, you just want it to be effective. So I'll show you how to combine the halo with some blending modes to achieve a better effect than the halo by itself. We're gonna employ some expressions so that you can automate the date created on. I know when I create a map for clients, often it goes through iterations and gets updated periodically. And if you set up an expression for the date, for example, you don't have to worry about updating that as you go through iterations of the map. We'll learn how to work with map themes to add a locator map to show people where this catchment is related to the country boundaries. And one of the nice things you can do in QGIS these days is set up label blocking. So here, when we add this inset, you're gonna be covering up some of the towns. And we can set up label blocking for this inset map so that those town labels basically move out of the way and doesn't cut any of them off halfway through. And here we also have a DEM that's the basis of this analysis. And it's not possible to actually create a pure gradient legend through the legend tool in QGIS at the moment, but we have another way we can add a gradient legend like this and I'll show you how to do that. So that's great. So that's what we're gonna do today. So I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and I give the floor to the court to do the demo. Okay, so this is the map as we finish up chapter four after the delineation of the catchment and calculation of all the channels. So we've got open street map, base map and color hillshade. And we'll probably just turn off the open street map for this. We're gonna use the hillshade as the base map for this map. We have the catchment boundary and the channels and they're styled by strailer order. And so the first thing we'll do here is finish up the styling before we get into the print composition and we'll use a, what we call an inverted polygon shape burst fill on the catchment area. So I'm gonna right click on the ruler catchment and I'm going to duplicate this layer. And here I'm going to, instead of a single symbol renderer for this, I'm gonna use the inverted polygons. So this makes it the opposite of what it is. And I will then check the simple fill and same change the symbol layer type to a shape burst fill. And it's gonna look a little psychedelic for a minute. Let's go down to a layer rendering and give it a little bit of opacity so that we can see the map behind. And here we're gonna use this two color method. You can also use color ramps for the shape burst. And we're gonna change the first color because orange does not work for us. We're gonna make this a gray color. So I'm gonna input the RGB value for this gray that I wanna use for this. And then I'm gonna check instead of whole shape set distance. And you can play with this when you get in it. You know, certain settings are gonna work in certain situations better. So I'm gonna set this at four, which controls how far away from the object the colors grade into one another. There's also a blur strength down here and you can experiment with that. And you can see what happens as we increase the blur strength and it basically controls how smoothly the two colors fade into one another. I'm gonna set this down at about a six. And so it's just a few settings. We now have the study area highlighted much more effectively than we would have otherwise. So we can still see the relief in the terrain around but we're really making the study area pop off the map a little bit. So the next thing we're gonna do is add some context to this. So I've downloaded cities and towns with the quick OSM plugin. So these are from OpenStreetMap. And I'm not gonna show that here because Han's covered that in the last webinar but you would, or the webinar before last actually, but you would use a key of place and the value of town or city to download these with that plugin. So for cities, I'm gonna use one of the styles that ships with QGIS, this topo pop capital. And then we're gonna use some labels for these. So I'm gonna switch to the labels tab here in the layer styling panel and choose single labels. And we'll use the name column. Gonna go ahead and give it a sans serif font. I'll choose Calibri. So usually with labels you want them to have a sans serif font that's easier to read as the labels are typically fairly small. Let's see. I'm gonna reduce the size of these a little bit and make the cities have a bold font. So they stand out a little bit more. Next, I'll go over here to the size tab here. I'm gonna give a slightly bigger offset distance. Right now you can see these labels are overlapping the symbol. And that is kind of an awkward thing to look at. So I'm gonna give a slightly bigger distance between the label and the feature. And you have some options here for label placement. So the default is around point. And I tend to like cartographic a little bit better. You can see how that shifts the label when you change the placement setting. And the last thing I'll do here for the labels is apply a halo. And again, if we just use the default white halo, it's kind of garish. It really has too much visual weight. It stands out too much. So what we're gonna do is change the color of the halo to something a little more subtle. So I'm gonna use an RGB value for kind of a light gray. And then I'm going to apply a blending mode. So blending modes physically blend layers together. But we can also use blending modes for label halos, logos on a map that can be used throughout the QDIS interface for different purposes. So here I'm gonna use a blending mode of soft light. And so now we get a little bit more, you can see easier to read the labels, but you don't have so much visual focus on that halo. It's effective without being distracting. So then we'll work with the towns, turn those on. And again, I'll use one of the simple symbols that comes with QDIS Topo Pop City and label those in the same way. And again, give them a little bit of distance between the label and the feature, set the placement type to cartographic. And we need to change the font for these as well. We use the same font that we use for the cities, Calibri, make them a little smaller and again, apply the same halo effect that we did before. So now that I've applied that, I've already got that in my recent colors so I can easily choose that for the color for the halo and apply the blending mode of soft light to those as well. So now we have a map that's a little more intuitive to a map reader and we can start working with the print layout. And before I do that, one thing I had a note about that we cover in the book is it doesn't happen often, but sometimes I have to make a map for a color blind reader and we're not gonna set this map up for a color blind audience. In fact, this one would be pretty difficult for most people who have one type of color blindness or another, but I want you to be aware that from the view menu, you can go and go to preview mode and you can simulate a couple of different types of color blindness. And this can really help some initial design decisions if you know that you're gonna be in that situation or you have to design it for a color blind audience. So now that we've got our map set up, we're going to set up a basic layout, new print layout, call it the roar catchment. So when the layout first opens up, we need to set up the sheet size for the map we're making. So here I'm going to right click on it to get to the page properties, which lets me set that sheet size. I'll keep it at A4, but instead of the orientation being landscape, our study area runs north-south, so I'll set this to portrait. And I'll go ahead and add our map. Along this left side toolbar here, you have all the tools for adding different map elements, including the most important map element, the map itself. So I'll go ahead and drag a box on the sheet of paper where I'm gonna have the map go. And we get the map showing up. So it needs a little bit of work. First off, I'm going to, I have some, there's a position in size section. And when you're working with any of the map elements, when they're selected, item properties is this tab here that's gonna give you all the different controls for setting up that particular map element. And so those will change, whether you have a north arrow selected or the map or the scale bar or the legend, you'll get appropriate options here. So under position and size, I had some settings here that I know since this is a web demo, work pretty well for this particular map. So I'm gonna go ahead and enter those right now. Normally I just play with these until it works. So this isn't usually something I do when I'm starting out a map. But since this is a demo, it makes things a little easier. So that kind of centers the map where we're gonna go and leave some room for the title at the top and below we're gonna add the legend, scale bar, north arrow and some text. So this map frame leaves room for those objects now. And we also need to adjust the scale. There are some controls up here for setting that up. So this first one, for example, will set the map to the extent to match the main canvas extent, which is the default. So what I'm gonna do to change the scale is simply type a scale in here that I know is gonna work. Normally when I'm making a map, I'll just type in scales to get roughly what I want. Occasionally you actually need to make a map at a certain scale, so that lets you control for that as well. And then usually you need to use that in combination with this move item content tool, which lets you pan the map within the map frame, staying at the same scale and you can get that centered. In this situation, my DEM is just big enough. I kind of shorted myself when I cropped out this DEM when I first did this exercise. So I don't have a lot of wiggle room for getting this placed on the map without showing the white strip to the west or east. So there's our study area labeled. Another thing that you may notice, and it's not happening here now, but occasionally when we have a bunch of city labels like this, here we have one. The label is hanging off the edge of the map. And one way we can easily control for that is to return to the main QGIS window. And for this layer that has that issue towns, I can click this button here, Automated Placement Settings. And there's a setting that's checked by default, allow truncated labels on edges of maps. So I'm just gonna uncheck that. So this will prevent labels from being cut off on the edge of a map. Doesn't seem like it really. That one must be within tolerance. So that's one nice trick that can really help when you have some labels getting cut off because that can be an awkward thing for the map reader to look at. So next we're gonna add the title. So I'll use the add label tool here with the T on it and drag a box across the top of the map and replace the default text there. Laura Mipsum with the name of our map, Rural Catchment and Channels. So we're gonna set the font for this. I'll use Times New Roman bold and bump it up to a bigger size like 36. And now that I've got the font set, make sure that title is centered and middle aligned. Since my box goes all the way across the map, having it centered here, centers it on the map composition as well. So next we're gonna add a legend. So remember what the purpose of a legend is to identify what symbols and colors that are on the map that may not be intuitive to the map reader. For example, if we have a blue line that says the roar, that then people are probably pretty sure what that is or if we have Rotterdam labeled, then we know that that is a city and it may not have to be something that has to be explicitly spelled out in the legend. But in this case, we certainly want the catchment to be in the legend and we want the strailer orders of our channels put into the legend so people know what that is. So I'm gonna keep that in mind as I add this legend. So I'm gonna grab the new legend tool and drag a box down here in the lower right. We're gonna put that. And this legend has all the layers in it in the map which is not something I need for this. I'm gonna uncheck auto update on the item properties tab here and begin to select some of these layers that I do not need and click the delete button to remove them. So I'm gonna remove everything except the channels. I don't need the base maps or the DEM there as well. So I'm just gonna have the channels and the catchment in my legend. You can also then reorganize. So I'm gonna put the raw catchment as the first layer at the top. And here you'll see that I have an underscore and so we want all of anything on this map we want to be in, if it's gonna be in English we want it to be in proper English without underscores and layer names. So I'm gonna click the edit button and take that underscore out, replace it with a space. And the same with the channels. And then for the strailer orders one, two, three I'm gonna spell out strailer order so that people know what that is. I will copy that because I'll reuse that for the other two. Okay, so now the legend has everything in it that I needed to have in it but it doesn't quite fit into the space as well as I would like. So another option you have with legends is to wrap them into multiple columns. So I'm gonna expand the column section and increase the number of columns to two. And I'm gonna tell it, it's okay to split layers and you'll notice as you move things around that you do get an indication of when it's gonna line up with the right side of the map. So now we have a legend setup that looks pretty nice. And actually I think I forgot a space in the channels here, but next we're gonna add a scale bar. So I'll grab the scale bar tool and I'm gonna place it down here in the bottom right or bottom left rather. So when you add a scale bar you have a choice of several styles. I'm gonna choose line ticks down. And actually you can set up different segments. So I can choose how many segments to the left and right of zero that I wanna have. And here I think the left zero right two default works well and five kilometers actually works pretty well in this case too, but you always have the option of adjusting these to fit. Sometimes it's very important for the map reader to know a specific distance on the map related to your study for example. And so in that case you can set up a scale bar so that it's a meaningful unit and distance. But those defaults work well for this just to give a general sense of distance on the map and the last thing I'm gonna change is the font. I'm gonna reduce the font a little bit for this. It's a little too large. Okay, so there's our scale bar and next we'll add a north arrow to the left to the right of it. So I'm gonna use this add new north arrow tool which is fairly new. This is just added a release or two ago a dedicated north arrow button. So it adds a graphic in previous versions of QGIS you would have added an image right here and gone in and searched directories and found a north arrow graphic that you would like to use. We can still do this with this option as well. You can search directories and you'll find the SVG symbols that you have and you can choose a different north arrow style if you'd like. You can also, the north arrow tool automatically syncs it with map one. So this is critical because this is really what makes it a true north arrow. It's oriented towards grid north in this case and you do have options to orient that between grid north and true north. I'll use the default here and you can also resize it with the handles or you can use the width and height here to change the size of this if you'd like. So I can make it a little smaller, for example and there's a resize mode here too. I usually like to use zoom and resize frame to match the graphic and now I have a nice north arrow on the map and again, the north arrow and the scale bar are meant to kind of support the map but you don't need them to be so big that they have a lot of visual weight. They're there to want to be the third or fourth thing the map reader sees, not the first or second. So they're there and they're functional but they're not dominating the map. So next we're gonna add some descriptive text that gives credit for the cartographer, the date the map was produced, the data sources. So this will be added the same way I added the title with the text tool here and I'll use the space just above the scale bar to add some text. So I'm gonna type data sources and so here we have SRTM for the DEM, OSM and we're gonna be adding some natural earth data in a minute. We're gonna be adding country boundaries for the inset and I got this from natural earth which is another great free resource for data. Correct my typing. Okay, so there's our data sources. Next thing I'm gonna add is cartographer. I'm gonna leave that blank for now because I'm gonna show you a trick for adding that. I could just type my name in here but I'm gonna show you another way of doing that here in a second and the last thing we'll type in here is today's date. So for example, I could type created on and today's date but I'll show you a better way of doing this. So instead of typing that all out what I'm gonna do is highlight this and click this button to insert an expression. So it opens up the expression window which is truly one of the most powerful parts of QGIS and I'm gonna use some functions that are gonna allow me to auto populate the date so that anytime I create this map it will get updated. So I'm gonna use a string concatenation function first so that's a function that just appends multiple pieces of text together. So I'm gonna type concat and I get a dropdown list that auto populates and find the concat function. You can also search for functions so if you don't remember what it's called or where they are you can type up here and it will begin filtering the list of available functions and you can find concat here in the string section that's the same one I'm using. And with any of these functions you can highlight them and you'll see a use example to the right and a syntax. So here it's gonna take two strings minimally separated by commas. So I'm gonna type here the opening parentheses for my concat function and I'm gonna type in some text and whenever we type text into QGIS we need it to be surrounded by single ticks. So I'll start with that single tick and type that same word created on colon space and then the closing tick. So that's my first piece of text. I'll type a comma and I'm gonna add the second piece of text. Now the second one I'm gonna use a variable of dollar now that represents the current time and date. And so what I'm gonna use first is a to date function that's gonna convert now into a date. So I'm gonna use to date. Anytime we use a function it has its arguments and parentheses. So I'll type in the opening parentheses and I'm gonna use dollar now which is the current time and I'll close that parentheses and the other parentheses. And so now you'll see down below the output preview shows it created on 2025 one. So it's always good to check that the output preview is giving you what you expect. Thank you. This is quite good at highlighting places where you may have an error in syntax now. So for example, if I backspace through one of these it's gonna tell me that the expression is invalid. And there is a little, it's hard to see on my screen but there's a little red mark here indicating that there's an issue at that part of the expression. Won't tell you exactly what's wrong but it tells you that there is and something to look into there. And again, the to date function is something that you can look up here and find and read about what it does. You can use this to format dates into different formats as well with the MMD YYY arguments. I'm gonna use the default. So I'll click okay. And now it inserts this expression here. And if I, another useful tool while you're building a map is you can zoom to one to 100% here. If I scroll down, we can see that now we have the date auto populated. The other thing I wanted to show you is using a variable to add your name as author. So variables are really useful. If I go to settings in the main QGIS window down to options, I'll get the QGIS wide options and what I'm gonna do is go to this variables tab. I'm gonna delete this one, I meant to. So these are variables that come with QGIS here. So there is one with my user full name that I could use here. So any of these variables are basically used to store some kind of constant. So you can use them to store conversion factors or text and things like that that you're gonna use over and over again. So here I'm gonna hit the green plus button to add a new variable. I'm gonna call it cartographer. And then in the cell to the right, I'm gonna type in the value for that. So cartographer's Gerardus Mercator. So I'm gonna go back here to my print layout and right after cartographer here and my label properties, I'm gonna again click the insert an expression and you'll see a section down at the bottom of the expression window for variables. And there are a lot of variables that ship with QGIS that can be quite useful that are there by default. Here's the one cartographer that I just added and you'll see that off to the right, it'll give you the value of that variable. So if I double click this variable and add it to my expression, variables always begin with the ampersand symbol. So there's at cartographer and its value is Gerardus Mercator. So I can click okay. And now we have our map made by Gerardus Mercator here. And I'm gonna reduce the font for this a little bit as well, I'm gonna take it down to a font size of eight. So it's not quite as large. So there was used a couple of expressions to help with that text a little bit. So one of the last things we need in here is the inset map that's gonna show the location of our catchment in relation to country boundaries. So to do this, I'm gonna show you how to use map themes. So we have this series of layers here that is our main map. And so what I'm gonna do first is select those and group them. I'm gonna make a group of my main map layers. So I'm gonna right click and choose group selected. I'm gonna call this main map. That's odd, it kind of reversed their order for some reason. So now I need to reorder these. Okay, so now I have this grouping of main maps. I could turn the whole thing off at once. So that's kind of handy. And I'm gonna make this my main map theme. So one of the buttons above the top of your layers panel is for map themes, the one with little I icon. And I'm gonna choose add theme and I'm gonna name the theme main map. So now I'm gonna go back to my print composition, select this map object. And I'm going to tell Qtis that this map is gonna follow the main map theme. So I'm gonna check follow map theme and choose main map, my one map theme from the list. So now this map will be following that theme. And now what I'm gonna do is set up some data for my inset map. So I'm gonna uncheck main map. I'm gonna turn on this count country boundaries layer which I downloaded from natural earth. And again, natural earth is a great resource for data that covers the world at several different scales. You can download hill shades, vector layers for cities and rivers and highways and boundaries and things like that. So I downloaded this country's layer from there. And I'm also going to make a copy of the roar catchment. So I'm gonna duplicate this and I'm going to right click on this and move this out of the group. I'm gonna create a new group up here between the country boundaries and the roar catchment. And this is gonna be my locator map. And now I need to do some symbology because the default pink color for country boundaries is not gonna work. So I'm gonna go over here to the layer styling panel and I'm gonna give this a fill style of no brush. So it's just black outlines for countries and bump up the width a little bit and then turn on the roar catchment. And instead of an outline for this, I'm just gonna make this a solid blue. So I'm gonna select the simple fill component and change the fill color to a particular blue. My notes to see what that's supposed to be. So now I've got it as a nice bright blue and I'll change it from no brush to solids but I actually see it. And I'm gonna make the outline the same blue. So I'm just gonna use the color picker for the stroke color to pick the same blue. And now I have the watershed or the catchment highlighted quite nicely. And I'm now gonna set this up as a different map theme. Actually, there's one more thing I wanna do before I do this. I wanna label the countries. So I'm gonna select the country boundaries and label them so that people know what these countries are. I'm gonna label the countries with the name and I'll make this as Calibri as well that I've same font I used for the cities and towns. So it all matches and reduce the size slightly to nine. So now I've got my locator map roughly set up and I'm gonna go to the map themes menu on the layers panel and I'm gonna add this as a theme and I'll call it locator map. So now if I revisit this dropdown menu you can see I have two themes locator and main map and I can toggle back and forth between the two. So now when I go back to my print composition I can add a second map to this and I can tell Q just to follow the locator map theme for this. And with this I can also, I'm gonna wanna set up the scale so that it works a little bit better and use the move item content to put the catchment more in the center of the map. So that works pretty well. The Germany labels not working very well cause it's on top of the catchment. So there's one thing I can do is move that label. I could go to the catchment and I could tell this to be a label blocking layer and it forces Germany off. So that's one option. And you can also obviously manually move labels. So I could use the labels toolbar with the move labels tool and select this Germany label. When you do this, it's always gonna ask you for the ID for that layer because what it's gonna do is join something from the project database to your layer which is the label position. So I can now move the Germany label wherever I want it to be positioned and go back to my map composition and see if that position works shifts slightly. So there's a couple of different ways you can handle moving labels to specific positions. Now that I've manually moved this one label for Germany where you're gonna see that is on this placement tab. You'll see down here, it now has a data defined coordinate X and coordinate Y position. If I hit this dropdown menu, you see that it is pointing to auxiliary storage. So it's being stored in the auxiliary storage for the QDIS project now. So I can move these labels now to precise positions wherever I want them to be. So that's another nice option. I actually like that better where it was. Another labeling issue and labels are something you can spend a long time to get to look right. So we've added this second map to our composition and it's covering up some of these map labels on our main map. So to help with that, it's now possible to set up different map objects as label blocking items. So I can select my main map and click on this label settings button here on the item properties for the main map. And these are all the different map elements I have. So I can check map two and you'll see that the labels get out of its way now. So by uncheck that, you can see this one label is kind of dangerously close to this map. If I make this inset map label blocking, the labels get out of its way. And you can do that with any features. Sometimes you may have a legend that's gonna sit on the map and is cutting off labels and you can set up a legend or any other map object to be label blocking. So one of the last things we're gonna do here is we've worked a lot with, this whole analysis was driven by the digital elevation model and we have this nice color shaded relief, but we don't have it represented in the legend. So what we're gonna do is add a gradient legend for the, to represent the DEM. And so I'm gonna use a little trick here and it's gonna add a rectangle to my map. We're gonna add a long thin rectangle over here. And I'm gonna set this up so that it has a width of five millimeters and a height of 50 and reposition it so it's in a good place. And instead of it being a white rectangle, what I'm gonna do is click on the color, choose a simple fill component. And instead of simple fill, I'll choose gradient fill. And here we used, if people recall, the color ramp we used for the DEM was from one of those CPT city topography color ramps called SDA. So I'm gonna use the same color ramp. So I'm gonna choose the color ramp option here. And I could, if we, if you didn't have this saved, you could go in here, whoops, click the drop down on color ramps and tell it you wanna create a new color ramp of the type gradient, whoops, I'm sorry, choose CPT city, not gradient. And then you open up the dialogue that's gonna let you choose these color ramps that come from CPT city. And there's a topography section. And the one we used for the DEM was SDA right here. So I can choose that as my color ramp. And so now it, and we have a nice situation here where the, it works quite well because the low elevations are to the north and the high elevations to the south and to the orientation of this matches the map quite well. It's also possible to save these color ramps to your collection by right clicking and choosing save color ramp. So I've also done that. So I could have also gone in here and just chosen the color ramp from my list of color ramps. The one thing though that we have going on here is that we have this color ramps in the main map over the shaded, the gray shaded relief with a blending mode. And it kind of dulls the colors a little bit or changes them, makes them a little darker. So what I'm gonna do here is another trick I'm going to, well, first I wanna have an outline around there. So I'm gonna go in here and add an extra symbol component and make this an outline simple line so that we have an outline around our gradient legend. And then I'm gonna just copy and paste this rectangle and drag the copy, snap it on top of the original. And on this copy of it, I'll remove that simple line. And instead of gradient fill, I'm gonna make this a simple fill and I'm gonna choose a gray color. So I'm gonna make this 70%, 30% opaque and I'm gonna make a kind of a light gray. So about a 70% on the value slider to get a nice gray and make it about 30% transparent. And it dulls that down just a little bit so that it matches what we're seeing on the map a little bit better. So the last thing I need to do is add the text so people know what they're looking at. So I'm going to grab the text tool and add a piece of text right at the top and I'll name this elevation. And then I can simply copy and paste this. And if I go, if I look at my dataset, the lowest elevation is I believe 12 meters goes from 12 to 700. So I'm gonna type in 12M for this nudge it up near the top and I'll copy this. And there we have a nice gradient legend for our map that has the ranges of elevations across the DEM that we're looking at. So the last thing I wanna do is going through this, I never added a frame around the map. So I'm gonna select the main map and in the item properties tab, check the frame option and make it a little thicker so that we get a little definition around our map that focuses the eye. And I'll do the same for the locator map. Another thing I'm noticing is that Luxembourg label is blending with the boundaries a little bit. So I could go back to the main map to the country boundaries and simply apply a default white halo around those labels. And now when I refresh, we can read that Luxembourg label a little bit better. So there we go. We've got a nice map that shows the results of our analysis and gives people an idea of where they're looking. So the last thing to do would be to export the map. So I'm gonna click the export as image button, put it into my working directory, click save. I can choose the export resolution and for this, I'll take the defaults. And when it's done, it's gonna end up with a nice little link here that I can click on to open up the folder so I can see the result. And there's my exported map. You can export that also as PDF, multiple image formats, SVG, et cetera. So that's it. That's chapter seven of the book and covers a lot of little tricks along the way. So I think we can, I don't know, Hans, if you wanna open it up for questions or if we want to move on to our mystery guest. I think there's one question here that I couldn't answer. There was, when you have this overview map with the catchment and the countries around it, you chose to fill the polygon and give the same color of the outline. Is there a difference between using the fill without a stroke? No, I mean, we could try that. We could certainly go in here and it's really just a matter of seeing what looks best. It might actually, it'll probably give it more definition if we, so it's more precise. If we don't have a fill around it, sometimes it can help cartographically to have a little more width or stroke around a feature and sometimes not. So in this case, it's probably not necessary. There's not a question about why not put a grid around it. I would like to respond to that myself. I see students also often putting a grid around it, but that's really if you want to use this to navigate in the field with a GPS, but if you want to use this to illustrate in your reference of cities, there will be enough for a normal reader, but you can, you can add a grid and of course maybe you can show where to find it. Yeah, here's the grids option. So you'd select the main map and you can add a grid here. It's quite a nice feature you can go in and set up a grid to be in different coordinate units spaced with specific distances. I do consider it something that's usually for a more technical audience. So the main thing to think about when you're putting together a map is who the audience is gonna be. And if it's gonna, if you're gonna be giving this to someone who really needs to know the UTM X and Y coordinates for spots on the map, then that would be something to add. If this is going to be something that's just gonna show the general results of your analysis, it's not necessary. So again, yeah, just really think about why you're making the map and who you're making it for. The main thing to remember is you're probably not making it for yourself, you're making it for someone else. And so you kind of have to put yourself in their shoes and understand what they're gonna need to see to understand what it is you're trying to show. There's another nice question from Leine. It's about this minimum and maximum value that you added to the elevation. Would it be possible with an expression to get it from the layer? Yeah, I think so. That's a good point. So if we go in here, there's the raster value function and we might be able to combine that with min or something to grab that automatically. But we'd probably then also have to round it because this is a floating point raster with decimal points and we'd have to get a little statement set up so that it looked right. It would have more detail than we need by default. And in this situation, it's easy enough to see the min max values and put it on the map, but you could certainly automate that with an expression, especially if this is gonna be something that you had to do over and over and over again. It's just a question from Mikau, but it's repeating a bit what I said before by the grid. So the grid is not just to get a lot long, but also to get the UTM coordinates or other coordinates that you want. You can specify the CRS. So by default for this map, it will take the one of the project, which is UTM zone 32 noise. But you can specify and you can even combine multiple grids on the map if you want to have a use for that. Yes, absolutely. You have to be careful. When you're combining multiple grids, it can get pretty busy pretty quickly. So you have to spend some time making sure that it's legible and informative all at the same time. And that's a challenge with any map. And as Kurt said, it's all about the purpose of the map. So some tips from my students who are gonna watch this back, hopefully, is if you include this map in a report, you don't put the title on the map, you put it in the caption. And you of course don't need to put the name and the date again there because we know the report is written by you. Hopefully. Yep. So you should always think about it. And if you have multiple maps, you're not gonna give the overview map, the locator map on every map that you put in your report. And probably go separately and where you introduce study areas. So that's very important. And for printing, somebody asked, I don't know that one, how to save in the CYMB format? Oh, that's a good question. I haven't had to do that in a while. I might have our mystery guest talk about that. Yeah. So how to introduce the mystery guest. So our mystery guest is on Niall Dawson. And I was really pleased that he agreed to do this here because it's very early where Niall is. We started at 5 a.m. his time. So really appreciate him taking the time out of his Saturday, it's not Friday, it's Saturday for Niall. It's his Saturday morning very early. So very much appreciate you taking the time to do this for us and really looking forward to what you have to show us. Yeah, thanks guys. Thanks for having me. And thanks for the great lesson, Kurt. So Kurt and Hans asked me to give a little demo on some of the kind of related topics I guess to today's lesson, but concentrating on new stuff that's coming with QGIS 3.14. So QGIS 3.14 is the next major release of QGIS and it comes out mid June. So it's kind of getting baked at the moment. There's still new stuff flowing into it before it gets into like a lockdown stage where the focus is on bug fixing and getting that ready for that final 3.14.0 release. So it's still new stuff flowing in kind of on a day by day basis. But there's been so far for 3.14 a lot of cool new stuff relating to making nice looking print maps. So that's kind of what we're going to focus on first today. So one thing I'd like to highlight, Kurt ran through about making legends and there's a lot more options in coming in 3.14 to help make your legends look really nice. So if I go into my map legend here, for instance, previous versions of QGIS had kind of limited control on exactly how you want this legend to appear, which would get a little bit frustrating if you could get it like 90% close to what you want in your head, but the spacing just wasn't quite right. So here's my print layout map with my legend sitting up here. In my spacing options now, so this is a beta version of 3.14. We've got a lot more control here for choosing how to space out these legend items. So I can go in here and I can say, actually this heading that sits in the middle of my legend, I actually want to indent it a little bit to make it just a bit more clear that the items underneath that belong to that group and maybe I'd boost that just for visual, something like that. We also have options in here as well now for things like we could actually shift my little symbols. So they're indented instead. So the group heading sit to the side and the group content gets shifted over to the side of that. So there's a lot more control in here about exactly how you want their legend spacing, which is handy if you're making like a map and you want it to be perfect, you might just get in here and this little difference between 0.1 millimeters underneath my heading or two millimeters under my heading might make a big difference. But another really cool thing that I like a lot is there's now a lot more control over individual the appearance of individual patches inside your legend. So I could go in here for instance and old versions of QGIS would always give my patches a rectangle shape and a really straight line. That's kind of okay for some feature types, but general, cartographic good principle is you actually want your legend to match the appearance of those features on the map. So having my trails as a big straight line when the trails are actually kind of bendy and jagged, it doesn't help you visually link this blue line to the actual content on the map. But now I can go in here and I can double click on this one. I get a lot of control in here, including the ability to change that shape of the line here. So I can click on here and say, actually for this one, let's go with something like this where it looks a little bit more like the actual trail looks like on my map. And I could go in and I could say, for this one here, let's change this one to this kind of jaggedy line as well. So we've got the actual little demonstration shape in my legend now matches a bit closer to what the actual shape would look like on the map. Makes it easier to use. I might do that for my beach as well. Let's pick something in here. This one can be my coast shape here. So it looks a bit more like the actual beach shape that we see on the map here. I'd play do the same. Don't want this as a big square blob when that should be something a bit more blobby kind of or something. I don't know. Like that. So we get a lot more control over the actual appearance. And now my legend starts to look like something that you'd expect to see on like a full production quality map. So Niles, is it safe to say that those that 314 will be shipping with a library of these legend patches, but it will also be possible for you to modify and create your own? Yeah, totally. So what we did is the legend patches is now a part of the style library. So if I go into my style manager here where all my kind of default symbols, Kurt showed some of those line symbols and such. Actually, so this was brought in in 312. You could do text formats and label settings. So I've now got like presets for my magic unicorns. I use that all the time. Never used it. But you've also got legend patch shapes here. So you can basically set up your own. It'll ship with a bunch of nice preset ones, but you can get in there and you can actually change these or you can grab some from libraries that people have already started to make such as this website here from Tim Sutton. He started to put together a collection of user contributed legend patches. So you can get on there and download those and add them to your own style library so that you've got a whole lot to choose from just from double clicking and that. And I actually really like this because in my view, I think if we, even if you've got say like two different river types, you might have like major rivers or sort of perennial rivers, having them as a slightly different appearance. So not sharing that same single river style patch, but you might have one style of rivers and then a second one actually helps make that legend really pop. Let's put that back over here. Where was my, here we go. Actually, another thing I want to look at is scale bars. So scale bars have gone through a bit more work in QGIS 314. So I'll find a blank space on my map over here and throw in a scale bar. So first off, we've got some new styles we can pick from. So the old versions had sort of single box, double box, then the various line tick kind of options here. There's now one here for this stepped line style where you get a kind of unique style that's not achievable without. With the older line ticks and also a hollow one, which apparently is used quite often. It's like a standard for South Africa. So for a certain user group, that's going to be quite exciting to have that. But one really cool thing we can also do in our QGIS 314 scale bars is, let's do a line tick one here, is we actually get a lot more control now about the appearance of them as well. So if I go in here, the older version would let me just pick the color. So I could pick the color for these scale bar lines and that was basically the extent of the customization. But now I could go in here and I could go really crazy because I could set up a whole symbol, just like a line symbol from my map, including, I could do a dashed line scale bar if I felt like that. I could do a kind of multi-layer one where we've got a black line, black thicker line sitting below and then the orange one on top. Or I could do something really crazy, like, where's my, where's it going? Something with like 3D effects or something. I don't know if anyone will ever use that, but the ability is there now. So you can go crazy and get your scale bars looking fantastic. And actually one handy thing here you could do is you could kind of use this to emulate that label buffer effect. So I could add a second layer on here, go down here. Let's pick a color for my map and then boost this up and get a little bit of a kind of visual boundary from my scale bar to the content of the map. The power, you just get full power. So that's, you know, you can do whatever you want now, including, I could even make this, let's go, let's get absolutely crazy and for a, let's do something silly like this one. Yeah, there you go. I don't think you'd ever want to see that as your scale bar on your map, but it's possible. So. Actually, on the topic of scale bars, another new thing that came, this is bugging me, let's put a nice scale bar back in, that came recently is you can, you have control over the number format for the scale bar numbers. So older versions of QDIS basically tried to pick that for you, which could be a pain if you really wanted to get a certain, you would after a certain look like you might be, have a direction from your client to say, this should be 1.0 and this one should be 2.0. Couldn't do that in previous QDIS versions, but now I can go to this new customized number format and I can actually choose to say, let's show the trailing zeros and I want two decimal places of accuracy. So I could go in there and I can customize that to, this is far as I feel like going, including the ability to say, let's say my scale bar was a meters, but I don't want a thousand separator, or I do want a thousand separator, but it should be a space instead of a comma or something like that. You can go as far as you want with that. Okay, another thing that I'd like to highlight is, in QDIS 3.14, in our print layouts, we've now got the ability to directly embed images inside that layout. So older versions, if I put a picture item in my scale bar and I went to pick a file somewhere from my computer, I picked my North Road logo, this is just a link. So if I gave that project to somebody else or if I made it into like a print layout template and shared that with somebody, if they didn't have that same file and that same location, they'd get a big red X to say, missing image. What we can do now is we can actually click this little down arrow and say, embed file. And if I pick my scale, my image that I want to put in there, it's now showing here as an embedded file. So that means that the content of that file has actually been saved into my print layout so I can now share that project. I don't need to worry about also sharing the images that are showing in my layout, they'll all appear and I don't need to worry about paths and all this kind of annoying stuff. It's really handy if you're making templates you want to save, share with people because I could just save that template. It includes that embedded image and I've got one file I can share and send around and people can make templates from that same, make print layouts from the same template that will look identical to including that embedded image. Hey, Kurt, how much longer have I got? Oh, I think you can still go over a few minutes. All right, in that case, I'll jump out of my print layout. Oh, actually, I'll highlight something. So this, there was a feature that came in QGIS 3.12 which was really highly in demand for a long time which was the ability to automatically make these label call outlines. If I find my layout here. So you could kind of make them in earlier versions of QGIS with a lot of stuffing around of kind of geometry generators and there were some plugins that tried to automate this for you. But the end result was always kind of clunky. It would sort of work in some cases but then break in others. In recent QGIS versions, we've now got the ability just in this tab here in my label settings to turn on and off these call outlines. And what that actually does is draw a little line between the label and the actual geographic location of that feature. And we get heaps of options in here so we can do things like we can change how far away from the feature that line should point to or how far away from the label it should start. So if it boosts us up a little bit, can start getting some slightly different effects and I could go in here and change that line style and say, let's make this one look more like an arrow. Fill around a bit with these settings, make this a bit bigger and get some really, you can go as far as you want. Again, with your call out styling here. And actually in this map, so I don't know if it shows up well on the screencast but I put a little shadow behind it using the draw effects. So there's a little shadow. So it basically makes it look like those call out sort of sitting above the map. Same with these numbered points that sort of sit above the map and it points into the map. It's a cool little effect there. I have a question related to that. Is what's the situation on support for having layer effects show up in the legend? Yeah, that works. It does? That works, yeah, that. Like if you have a drop shadow on a road or something like that and when you. Yeah, it will show up in your legend as well. Oh, cool. Since I don't know, three, four, three, six, something. Let me show you something else that's coming in 3.14. So this is really new. It's still in the sort of peer review stage. So you can't even get this in a beta release. It's public, but not yet pulled in. We've now got in queue just the ability to automatically put labels outside of polygons when they can't fit inside. So if I zoom into my map here, this label here for plant on island, when it can, it'll sit nicely inside that feature. But as I zoom out and the feature gets smaller with respect to that label size, now there's no option for it to sit inside there nicely. So in my label settings here for this layer, I've said, huge as, hey, you can now choose and you're allowed to put labels outside of polygons. So let's turn that off. It's got to fit inside there, but it's kind of awkward. If I turn this on, it said, actually, it'll look better if I put it outside. And the nice thing is it's picked a really nice place for that label to sit outside. So it's got this cool logic that sits behind it, which tries different candidate positions and based on some research that some people did. And the end result is, I'm really happy with how well it links these outside labels to the actual shape of the feature. And as I sort of pan around here, I get good effect here, the changes that we zoom in now. So that's controlled by this checkbox, allow placing labels outside of polygons, or I could just decide for this particular layer or for my lakes layer, actually, I always want to label them outside the polygons, there's some more lakes. So in this case, regardless of the size of the polygon, I've said that's where I want to put them, it's outside. So it's doing that for me. So that's a really nice sort of cartographic feature that just couldn't be done without a whole lot of manual label placement in previous, hugest versions. I could go all day, Kurt. Does anyone have any questions for Nile? Hey, Nile, how did you create that nice little wave effect on the previous map project? Was that like a random dot boundary thing or? Oh, let's have a look. Cause I know that new random dot renderers in there, I was wondering if that was that. So Kurt's talking about this, is that what he's talking about? Yeah, the little waves. Well, let's make that a little bit clearer. So in this ocean layer, we've got these little wave kind of symbols scattered around there, just to add a bit of texture to that big, otherwise blue area. Actually, the reason I wanted to do that for this map here is if I bring up the print layout, this is a tourism map. So basically this particular area, it's a tourist central place, and it's all about going to the beach. So you go to this particular area cause you wanna go fishing or you wanna do water activities and play on the beach. So basically the emphasis on the map here is like the water has to be the hero of the map and the beach areas have to be like that. That's the important thing. So when I first made this map, if I just had a kind of blue water, it really didn't help convey that feel. So I've done a few things here to help exaggerate that. So one is I use a shape burst fill. So the shape burst fill is what gives me this nice sort of gradient effect on the outside of the water. If I turn it off and we just go back to the plain old simple light blue fill, it doesn't really have any depth to that layer. So I go in here and I've added a shape burst that goes from a slightly darker blue here to a transparent color. Going in a distance eight millimeters from the edge of that ocean. So we go from a little bit darker to a bit lighter. There's a really weird thing about shape burst fills and water is that you kind of expect in your head that it would look best if you go from a light color to a dark color and kind of match what it would be in reality. But on maps it actually looks better if you do, you've just ignore reality and you go from dark to light. Anyway, so I do one here, that's eight millimeters going like that. And then I've got a second one that's more exaggerated. That's only one millimeter wide to get a really nice kind of gentle subtle one but a hard boundary right on my shoreline. And lastly, I've got this point pattern fill, which is my darker, which is my little wave effect here. Kurt asked if it was a random fill. It's not a random fill because I found that if I did a random fill, it would look okay for some areas of the map, but the nature of random means that other bits might have a few too many in there. And I actually liked the result of a regular, but sort of with displacement to get a quasi random, but not too random result and it looked better. That's just a SVG marker. So this little pattern here is a SVG symbol that's got those little V lines. And I think that came from, yeah, from this project, this website here, which is my favorite place to get map symbols. The neon project. So if you go in here and I do a search for waves, then you get a whole bunch of stuff that is like fantastic for maps. Somewhere here, you'll see the one I used. The nice thing about this website is a lot of them are creative commons. Actually, most of them are creative commons, so you're kind of free to use them. But you can sign up and then they all become just free for you to do without attribution. So it's actually pretty cheap to sign up for a year. And then you just get all these like thousands of thousands of symbols for your maps that you don't have to attribute if you sign up to their website. It's good, neonproject.com. Here we go, I don't get a kickback. Yeah, so that's how I did that one anyway. Desik. All right, someone's asking on the text chat about printing in C-I-C-Y-M-B, so C-M-Y-K, C-Y-M-K, sometimes referred to. There's no native support in QGIS for that. So if I was providing a map to somebody or to a print shop that needed it in the C-C-M-C-Y-M-K, C-Y-M-B format, I would actually get my print layout, export that as a PDF, pull that into Adobe Illustrator, and then set up the C-Y-M-K formats and separation inside Illustrator. But I would go through PDF as the intermediate step to get the map across to Illustrator. Fantastic. Nice. Really, the art of making maps and QGIS offers so many new tools for us to explore in the coming, the lockdown can't be long enough for this, I would say. Well, I mean, the QGIS release has come out every four months, and there's always a change lock that's in SA in itself. So there's lots of new stuff all the time. Thanks a lot. We'll continue with the program and I hope Neil will stay with a coffee for the GeoBeers because I guess it's still breakfast time over there. And then we can have some more questions for him, maybe get in touch with each other. So some other people entering the room, Tim Sutton seemed to be here too, which is also nice. He experimented a lot with these new things. We've seen some stuff on Twitter. Hey, Tim, your new website got a shout out too. This website got a shout out. Yeah, that's nice. Okay, let's continue with the program. So I'll put on the PowerPoint. We just have a few slides at the end. So this is what we covered. Those are really nice. Just some plugs from Curt and from me. So if you wanna learn more, check the OpenCourseWare website, GISOpenCourseWare.org. And there'll be much more soon on that. I'll keep you posted on that. The YouTube channel, we reached more than 5,000 subscribers, which was a nice moment. And you can see also these webinars back there and other videos. And a lot of these webinars and our special guests inspire me to make new stuff. So let's see. We also give courses. There were some questions about certified courses to get the certification. Well, we offer those at IHE Delft, the next phase to phase one, if everything goes well with the COVID, is on 14 to 18th of September. And Curt joined the last two years. Eric Mirber, who is now in the attendee, he will be lecturing with me in September. So he's also on the picture here. We do always mapathons during those GIS classes with our students. And we also have an online course and today I've issued certificates. Also for the online courses, we offer the certificates. And you'll see an example. Then another plug is that there will be a webinar next week, 6th of May with HatteriLabs with Sol Montoya. And we will give a webinar about open education because we offer all these things for free and you might be wondering why and how it works. And maybe you want to give away also nice tutorials yourself, how to do that. So we'll talk about lessons learned from our experience, the good practice, the challenges that we face and the business models. So if you're interested in that, have a look at our webinar. You can subscribe to the link. I'll post them later in the chat and they'll be also all over the place in social media. Then the last thing that you might have noticed in my post of the last few days is there's an area that we mapped with a mapathon when there was a big drought and where we do a lot of projects in the Mara River Basin in Kenya. And a good friend who also works a lot in our projects, Mark Robolo, he got in touch with me that his community is really in trouble. The bridges are washed away and because of the lockdown, they cannot go to their local markets and prices have tripled. So I started the crowdfunding and if you would like to help, I keep it open over the weekend. We already got quite some donations, but the more we get, the more people we can help. So you can see here on the picture, the part that we mapped around all our Cassie in the street map, which is empty in Google. So it gave me some space to put the link. I'll also put it in the chat and yeah, hope some of you can also still donate to that to help these people out. And yeah, we do a lot of hydrological research in that area. We have been out there with students using the input app gathering data with your hydrological modeling. Give the floor to Kurt. So yeah, people may have seen this on Twitter, but pretty amazing turnout for this webinar series. So we have people from 72 countries that have registered for this, total 312 people. So I'm just amazed, it's really fantastic. It's been great connecting with everyone during the GeoBeers Geo Coffee segment at the end. And so yeah, I saw some comments on there about doing the same for Discover QGIS. And I did do the 30 days of Discover QGIS Twitter thread to begin the year. And I have thought about doing some webinars in some of the chapters out of that book, but I can only do one series of webinars at a time. So recently I've had so much work to do that I haven't had time to do more than this, but it's in the works. And I think that might be nice to, especially if this lockdown continues, or if we got another one in the fall to continue these online webinars, people seem to appreciate it. So I'll try to do that. And then the other thing I just wanted to mention was I'm not associated with this podcast, but it is my favorite geospatial podcast called Mapscaping. And so if you're a podcast addict like me, you might enjoy it. I did do an episode on the QGIS project that was out about a month ago. And I just recorded an episode talking about input and Q field and mobile data collection with those QGIS related apps. So look for that in the coming weeks. So we're at the end of the series of these webinars. And Kurt, that has been really great. I think a lot of attendees as your map showed and good chats, good questions, good participation, lots of things people took up. I've seen on social media. So that has been really motivating to do this. And yeah, I would be happy to open a beer now and to have some GeoBears with you. But I know it's in some places, maté time or coffee time. So join us. I'll open up the video in the microphone and we can share our ideas and Jaya's knowledge with each other further. Cheers to everyone.